Ameba

The Challenge

Operated by Cyber Agent Inc., Ameba is one of Japan’s largest blog services, with 32,430,000 members (as of end of December 2013) and hosts many blogs for celebrities and well-known personalities.

With more than 1,000 campaigns running on Ameba every month, and with hundreds of campaigns starting and ending every week, a great deal of time and resource was needed to manage this. In addition, as the campaigns were managed using Excel, it was very difficult to understand how each was progressing, forecast performance in a precise and efficient manner, have an insight into what changes to implement if there were performance issues and how these would impact other campaigns.

Cyber Agent wanted to address this situation to ensure every campaign, both display and mobile, reached its delivery goal, while also making maximum use of Ameba’s rich content and audience data to drive greater performance for its advertisers, for example by generating higher CTRs.

The Solution

With the introduction of ADMAX, Ameba can now manage every campaign from the dashboard, which has resulted in a dramatic improvement in efficiency.

For Ameba, ADMAX generates daily recommendations based on campaign delivery, the delivery status of other campaigns, and information on booked campaigns. These recommendations come in the form of optimization actions that can be delivered directly into the ad server, along with the predicted campaign improvements and the impact on other campaigns.

While operating and managing campaigns used to be incredibly difficult using Excel, ADMAX has now made the process transparent, simple and effective.

Utilizing its rich and highly valuable audience data was also critical for Ameba. ADMAX makes it possible to not only forecast, but also drive improved performance by discovering audience segments with a high affinity to a particular campaign, and then giving priority to these audiences.

Additionally, Ameba is even able to improve performance for campaigns with very short flight dates by making use not only of the delivery data for a current campaign, but also information from the advertiser’s past campaigns and creatives. This dramatically increases the volume of data available for analysis, making it possible to optimize these campaigns at a much earlier stage and with higher accuracy.

This has also made it possible to automate campaign optimization over weekends, allowing safe optimization rules to be set so as to deliver a more continuous and effective operation.

Now Ameba’s advertisers can expect improved budget utilization and higher campaign performance across display and mobile due to this programmatic approach as well as driving optimization based on both an advertiser’s past and present campaign results.

The Results

Using ADMAX to optimize has resulted in a 40% average increase in CTR for hundreds of campaigns, while meeting all their delivery goals (figures from Ameba, October 2014). In terms of automated operations, over 100 campaigns are optimized every weekend without impacting on any others.

“The introduction of ADMAX has allowed us to manage each campaign in an even more precise manner. We are very pleased with the performance and it has enabled us to make more effective use of Ameba’s wealth of data to deliver a higher than expected KPI uplift for both display and mobile campaigns.”

“Our advertisers are very happy with the recent performance improvement too. Most of all, the use of past campaign data has led to a more effective use of the advertiser’s budget and we believe this is a crucial factor in the satisfaction of our advertisers.”

“So far we have focused on improving CTR but we are also planning on improving “actions” (CVRs) too. There are also many other areas that we want to try to optimize, such as around new metrics like viewability. Above all, we intend to keep on developing advertising offerings so that we deliver ever higher value to our advertisers.”

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